The Last Days of Pompeii

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The town is bustling, citizens walking up and down its stone streets, buying food from local bakeries, reading announcements on the walls, saying when the next gladiatorial games were to be held at the amphitheid just down the road, passing great townhouses,

home to wealthy families.

In one of these houses, lives are merchant. He was called alice and brickiest scouts. Now scourous had become something of a merchant celebrity, a magnate whose goods were famous throughout Pompeii, and even far beyond the city's rules. The man was renowned for a very peculiar commodity, a smelly, yet highly desired delicacy

of the time, a fish source known as Gaurram. From his workshops in and around Pompeii, scourous had built himself a Gaurram Empire. With clay vessels carrying this condiment stamped with his mark, being transported across the Roman Empire to places far away as an umdinium, indistant Britannia. You can imagine scourous being pleased with himself and what he had achieved.

Life was good for him in busy Pompeii, something that certainly couldn't be said for everyone. The occasional crowned shaking earthquakes, originating from the towering mountain above Pompeii, was a discomfort that he was willing to endure. Scourous intended his Gaurram business to last for generations. He had no idea that his destruction was imminent.

hours later, at an apocalypse had descended. Day had turned to night, a huge column of black rock and ash spurting from Mount Vesuvius covering Pompeii in a veil of darkness. For scourous and many other Pompeians, they faced a stark choice.

“Do they hide and wait how this hellish experience, or do they try and flee?”

Welcome to the ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes your host, and this is the story of the last days of Pompeii, exploring the lives of Pompeians who experienced this catastrophe

first hand, figures like Scourous.

Our guest is Dr. Jessica Venner, leave a home early career fellow at the University of Oxford, and the author of "The Lost Voices of Pompeii". Yes, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today, it's great to have you on the ancients. Thank you so much, I'm so, so, so happy to be here.

And to talk about Pompeii and not just the story of its destruction, the other part, which I think is the best part, it's the story of the lives of the people who are around at that time.

“I know, the ordinary people, I think, part who often get left out of the story, and they”

are the story, so I think, yeah, we need to start talking about that definitely. Do you think this is actually the real jewel in the crown in the story of Pompeii, it's the lives of these ordinary people, they're not emperors, they're not high-born senators, they're living their lives in this town. Exactly, they're the people that built the empire, you know, they're the ones behind the

scenes, the bakers, you know, the politicians that were on a lower level, the slaves, we don't talk about them, and they are the ones holding the empire up, so they definitely deserve a story for sure, yes. Well, let's set the scene, so Pompeii in the 70s AD before the eruption, how important it is, and a town, or can we see a city, was this in the Roman Empire at that time?

“You know, it was an ordinary town, and that's what makes it remarkable, in a way, because”

of the way that it was preserved, it's the sense that we've actually got this snow globe of a city, and it was important, just as much as any other town in the region was, because

of Vassuvius, now they didn't know this, they didn't know Vassuvius was of volcano, they

just saw it fantastic, there's a really fertile area, they used to grow on the volcano

“on the sides of the vines, so that's what made Pompeii important, it was on the River Sano,”

it was right by the sea, which we find very odd now, but the eruption did push it coast out, and so they were able to connect themselves by the road and the sea, and, you know, two other market centers, including Rome, and it wasn't too far away, relatively speaking, so it was an important part of, you know, the operation of Rome itself, one of those towns. And do we think there were many other than, like, many other Pompeii-like towns in the vicinity,

likewise, making the most of that really fertile land in Campania, that rich area of Italy, so we think of Pompeias you need today, but before the eruption, you know, there are many other settlements that were quite similar to it. Absolutely, yeah, and they were all sort of known for their own things, there was something unique about each of them, so of course we've got Herculanium, that was very much on the

coast, that had its own, you know, harbour right there, Pompeii did as well, but this one was characterized by being very sea-heavy, they ate a lot of seafood as well, we know that from their skeletons, and it was a much smaller town but much more posh, a lot of rich people would live there, they even had marble sort of line streets, so they were a lot fancier than Pompeii, which was very much a market town, it was very commercially driven, there

were a lot of shops and workshops, creating things, whereas then you've got lots of villas around Pompeii and the other towns, and smaller towns, and bigger town, Puteoli, was another one right on the coast, on the Bay of Naples, that was a very important harbour town,

“the most important until it was moved to Austria, I think, and so it was, there were all”

these different characteristics of these towns, they all had their role to play, but in their own right, they were ordinary towns, so what was Pompeii in particular, what was Pompeii famous for? Pompeii was famous for a few things that might surprise, Pompeii was famous for fish sauce, Pompeii was famous for cherries, and Pompeii was famous for cabbages,

I've never heard cherries and cabbages being linked to Pompeii before, yeah, plinies really

like enthusiastic about this, you know, the importance of Pompeii in cherries and fish sauce, which is fantastic, because, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but we know who was making the fish sauce, so even more mind blowing, but it was also famous the region for, actually, plinney mentions Pompeii and wine and says, you know, don't drink it unless you want to headache in the morning. Yeah, you're right, okay. Yeah, so it's because it's

really strong and quickly made, it's not, you know, for your fancy people, which would be made out in the villas, for example. And do they have any inkling that this special

“mountain that they were right next to? Did you have any inkling that it was a volcano?”

So there were mutterings, for example, we've got the truvius who was an architect at the time, and he wrote about obviously architecture, but other materials and things that would come into that process, and he reflected on the sponge stone of the area and said, oh, it was a bit weird, because that's kind of like the ones around Mount Etna, and then we have people like Strabo saying similar things, you know, saying, there's fire pits, you know, it looks like it's been

charred, and he's kind of, it's kind of again, okay, this is looking like elsewhere, you know, and they were aware of the earthquakes in the area, and they would have made the connection in a way, but no one specifically said, this is a volcano, and so, you know, again, it was just inklings. They had no cultural memory within recent enough memory for it to have passed down as that fact. And Mount Etna, as you mentioned in passing, so that's the big volcano in north-east

Sicily, which they knew was a volcano at that time. Yes, yes, exactly. So they had that point of reference, and of course the earthquakes were very commonplace in Campania. We have these mentioned fairly regularly, and, you know, they say, Campania is plagued by earthquakes, and they even sort of wonder whether there's giants living under the volcano and things that are causing these rock bubbles. Yes, exactly. So they're making links, but no one specifically comes out and

says, okay, the sum of this is a volcano. Because Pompeii had experienced some quite severe earthquakes before 70 AD hadn't it? Yes, so in 62 AD there was a huge earthquake which hit the town on the

fifth of February specifically. We know this specific date, that's incredible. We do, so it was between

five and six on the Richter scale. So it's fairly large, but it caused widespread destruction. Pompeii was very badly damaged. Other towns were as well, but Pompeii is particularly mentioned by writers at the time. And they say that people in the town were walking about unable to know what to

marble cutout almost a decoration in someone's house. A banker called Kaikilius, who if anyone's

“done a Cambridge Latinical Julia, we know Kaikilius as the daughter. And he had a freeze around his”

in his atrium that was depicting this earthquake. So you've got little statues in the forum next to the temple of Jupiter falling off of their horses in this picture. A little satirical sort of take on the earthquake. But interestingly, Kaikilius potentially died in this earthquake, because he was one of the biggest bankers in Pompeii. And his records, his wax tablets, were found in his house by excavators. And the records stop almost exactly at the date of the earthquake.

So so he died or he decided, right, this is two. I can't do this anymore. I'm moving to Illinois more something like that. Although I do find it really weird that his family would commemorate

the earthquake that potentially comes into his atrium. And we're memorial right there. Exactly.

But what I love about that is that, because we're such a severe earthquake. It's six on the Richter scale. I mean, for years they're having to mend Pompeii. So even in the 70s, you can see evidence of rebuilding, changing the materials, deciding how they're going to fix certain buildings that had only kind of partially fallen down. So should we also be imagining Pompeii coming up to 79 AD? Maybe not the wealthiest it's ever been. But a city assessment that is in a state of

repairing. It's very much that, yes, we sort of, you know, we think of Pompeii today. It's this sort of gray landscape of buildings without roofs and things like that. It's quite hard to imagine what it would have looked like. But there are clues throughout the site. There's cracks in walls. They've blocked up doors. They've changed the structure of buildings. Most importantly, a lot of buildings that were residential were being converted into commercial properties,

or gardens, which is something I've spent a lot of time studying. We can certainly explore that. Yeah, we must. We must. And so there was this sort of resilient response to this point of crisis. And they were having other crises going on as well. There was a recently recorded famine during this period of time. This last 20 years, for example. And Pompeii had a fight with new Syria, this local town in a riot, and people were killed. And then they were punished

for it by the Emperor and the Senate. So they're having a bit of a rough time, but not that they really paid attention to that, by the way. But they're having a bit of a rough time. And so they seem to look at these problems. A bit like we did during COVID, where you start to find creative ways to get around challenges. And you can see that across the town. So, yes, they're in a point of repair. I mean, the stabbing baths, one of the biggest bath houses in the town was still being repaired at

the time, whereas the Temple of ISIS was repaired immediately. By, I think he was seven years old. This young boy who repaired the Temple of ISIS. I'm sure was just him, right? Okay. All by himself. But he funded it. And that shows us that actually, you know, ISIS was a goddess of rebirth. And I think that's a beautifully correct. And it took him from Egypt as well. Yes, yeah. Interesting, yes, because they're not prioritizing Roman temples. The Temple of Jupiter in the forum was still

out of use at the time of the eruption, but they were like, no, we must prioritize this temple, which is for a goddess who was open to all social strata, slaves upwards. So she was unique in that

“way anyway. So I think it's really important to look at those points of cracks. And you can find”

what people would prioritize in them. It's such an amazing way to get an insight into, you know,

kind of that life and pay at that time. And do we have any sense in regards to the total population? This is a tricky question for me to ask because there's all of this debate. A new piece of information comes to life. And they say, oh, actually, it's more than 20,000 or less than, you've got an opinion on that. I'm opinion on a lot of things. I think that 20,000 is a very, very normal, you know, amount for that sort of size of city. It's usually based on the amphitheater's

capacity. That would have held a good amount of people. So it does follow that that should be at least to the amount that can fit in the amphitheater. And then obviously not everyone's going to go to every single game. And then you've got slaves on top of that. The slaves are the problem really, actually, in the calculations of these things, sometimes they're discounted too much.

“And I think they were far more slaves than are counted in some. Some of the estimates have gone”

down to 7,500. Oh, I thought we'd just use those more. I mean, anyone that's been to Pompeii, you've been many times. And you can see that it's a huge town, really, you know. And also, then you would count the scissors and read outside of the town walls as well. Do you count those in, yes, you do, because they're part of that territory. So it's a very open question, but I would personally say about 20,000 is a good estimate. You also mentioned how in the changing landscape

know you've done a lot of work on that. Why? Why do so many people take advantage of this,

this changing landscape and decide, right, I'm building a garden? Oh, so it is this natural response that humans have to revert to horticulture in points of crisis. Yeah, we have it all over the world. It's still happening now and I did mention COVID. We all start gardening again. All of a sudden there were, you know, window boxes everywhere and everyone wanted an allotment. It's almost

“like a natural response, but in Pompeii, it was an opportunistic thing, I think. So after the earthquake”

in 862, in those 17 years, up until the eruption, there was a 250% increase, I found in urban agricultural garden. 150%. Yes, and just in two out of nine regions. So in the south-eastern corner, nearest the amphitheater. And this was once an area that was very agricultural anyway, and then over time it

was built up between, you know, like 300 and 180 BC, we see it really developed and then you've got

the colonization of Pompeii and towards the end of, you know, the republic. So that's when it becomes a natural Roman city. That's when it becomes Roman. So by the time of the eruption, it had been Roman less than 200 years. She's crazy to think, isn't it? And then they start putting vineyards and orchards and vegetable plots and perfume gardens where residential buildings had been. And the part of the reason for this was because there was the destruction, of course. So they're having to

take down properties because they damaged. But there were laws in place that were stopping this happening

“across the empire because the senate were really concerned that, you know, the towns of the Roman”

Empire were becoming a bit drab and a bit shabby. So they were like, can everyone just stop demolishing things and profiting off it, please? But they were like loopholes in that rule. And so in Pompeii, they were making the most of that. They were destroying properties so that they could create these large gardens and some of them were huge, like 1500 square feet. So it's quite impressive. It's one of those things you can also forget when you're going through the ruins of Pompeii today

is to imagine that the open spaces, you know, and you know, what is such a vital part of the story, so I'm really glad we can mention that. A psychological nature of it as well. If you see more evidence of foliage in this studio in future recordings, then you know that we're going now through a crisis in the background. So that's a nice thing. So that's why you see that. I have to ask one more question about dates, which is the date of the eruption itself.

So controversy around the size of Pompeii, is there also still a bit of a question mark, the jury is out as to when exactly in 1798, Mount Vesuvius erupted. Yeah, there is. Amongst archaeologists that study Pompeii, including myself, we all disagree. Okay, good. Yeah. Sounds great. It's a constant ongoing debate and an interesting one,

“because I think they're all valid and people often ask me, why does it matter?”

It matters greatly because the Roman calendar was very specific about what could happen when, and so it tells us a lot about what they were doing at the time, which is, you know, impactful from the point of view of gardens, because we've just been talking about them, had the harvest just happened, it looks like it had, and that's one of the reasons that we think about a certain date. So I'm in the camp of thinking, it was in the autumn. In my book, I've said the 24th of October,

but the classic date is the 24th of August, which of course we get from Pliny. And, you know, I think there's good reasons for the 24th of August is obviously if something keeps being repeated in a manuscript, then that's pretty good evidence of that, right? And people like Pliny, the younger were from a very young age trained to have an incredibly good memory for rhetoric. So that was just something they were doing. So, you know, okay, fine, that makes sense.

However, there's lots of archipitanical, you know, they'd already seem to have done the harvest, and they'd sealed up the amphora in the floor, so they'd finish that process of winemaking. There were coins found there that pushed the date back, because the Emperor Titus had had an acclamation, which is sort of like a grandiose way of showing that he was in charge and isn't this wonderful. And that kept happening. And so his the date of that is a little bit later.

So that's sort of pushing it already. And yes, it could have been August, but that coin would have had to go into circulation and get to Pompeo within a couple of weeks. So it's kind of like, hmm, is that realistic probably not? Could happen? But this is the thing, when you start looking into the evidence, she like, "Yeah, no, could be." And then, hmm, so, for example, one of

the things that always comes up is clothing. People say, "Okay, they were wearing wool clothing."

And then on the other side, you could say, "Yes, it could be chilly." But, you know, and obviously the cloud has gone over the, you know, the sun's it's going to be chilly anyway, but wool is fire-attardent, so it's going to stop burning. And there's the charcoal graffiti, of course.

Again, every, there's an argument for, of course, against everything. This is why when you said

“that there was debate, I'm not, oh good, because I love hearing the theories put forwards from”

either side, because when you have a debate like this, it's not one side is evidently clearly wrong.

There are good arguments put forward for both sides, and so it's always very interesting to hear.

I do see what you mean, they're about the later date, and there's like, "Pomogram it evidence and all that is happening." Oh, the pomegranates. Yeah, the pomegranate problem. Yeah. Is that the pomegranate problem? Okay, that's another, like the poll that we won't go down to. No, no, no, no. I mean, you mentioned your book there, so your book focuses on the lives of certain individuals who are live in Pompeii in 79 AD. Should we briefly just go through

who these figures were, and how we know about them? Oh, yes. These figures I came across time and time again, and I got to know them very well over the course of my doctoral research,

“and I was very fond of them, but I very much felt like they weren't getting a voice,”

and so I wrote the loss voices of Pompeii to give them that, and a bit of their dignity back as well, because sometimes they're sort of just forgotten in the archaeological record, and in the terms of the destruction of the city is given a lot of importance, and so we have a slave. He's a composite of slaves, because obviously we can't know what he was getting up to every day, because of the nature of his invisible work, right? But Petronus, who, I've given him that name, did exist. He's found

in a loan between two women as collateral for a loan of money. So he did exist in the city. We've got a female businesswoman, Julia Felix. She's quite famous now. She's quite well known. She's quite famous, but I wanted to show her side of things of living in a man's world.

And we know about her from her incredible estate, in Pompeii, with bars and her own apartments,

other apartments that people could have for themselves, shops, gardens. So we know a lot about her. She has her own restaurant. I've been in that room in that restaurant, but like kind of the the tricling of the reclining area, but also kind of seats and the kitchen, narrowly oven, and the counter as well. And that's all part of her estate. Alongside her domours isn't it if it's in the city walls? Exactly. A luxurious house.

Exactly. And it's very, you know, male outward. And from a from a Roman perspective, this is something that a man would do. Like it's outrageous. You know, to us since in that way, it seems outrageous. As a modern person, we're obviously like, well, that seems pretty normal, but it absolutely wasn't. You know, she's putting advertisements outside her property, saying, you can rent out my apartments. You can use the Venus bars for

discerning people, but so she's trying to get a certain audience. I love that so much. But we don't know who she is from the sense that she's called Julia Felix. This is quite a slave. Like, Fried Woman's sort of name Felix is usually put on the name. It's okay. So for me, she might be a Fried Woman Julia. She might be from the clan of

“Julia Caesar's clan. Okay. That's important. So maybe she came from Rome. And then she's saying”

she's daughter of Spurius, which means that she's not a daughter of this sort of, she can't claim heritage in that way. She's a complicated figure. And I love that mystery around her. So she's just really fascinating as a woman. The location of her state also, it's right next to the amphitheater. So that's quite prime posting. Oh, my God. Yes. It absolutely isn't. You know, she's in a lovely district, because like we said, she's surrounded by these beautiful vineyards and orchards and things,

but it is like an entertainment district as well. She had some involvement. We think in the chain, the pedestrianisation of the road outside her house, which which divides her from the amphitheater. So she clearly had a big voice in the city. And this isn't completely unusual on Pompeii. We have got other women like Yumakia who lived some time before Julia, who is commemorated in the forum, but as a result of her own self, she's doing it. She's got a two-mout side of the city walls

that Julia in the book visits because it's sort of this really difficult environment to navigate any way as a man. So can you imagine how difficult it is for a woman? So for them to then be commemorated

in the city. That's that's incredible.

Nah, no one has ever seen a woman in the city. She's looking for a way to get a living in the tribe, with her own milk, milk, and her own children. She's a woman who lives in a living room. She's a woman who's a woman who's a woman. She's an interactive exhibition by the elite tourist, Adiogheite and a classic and the next parvillion, the whole world of the city. She's looking for a way to get a living room. She's looking for a way to get a living room.

Or do you actually think that she is a way in which we can actually push aside an idea that it's

“always dominated by a member, but actually women could rise high in a place like Pompeii?”

I think Pompeii is starting to reveal those secrets in the sense that the impression we've had, like you're saying, is not actually quite what it was, on paper, sure. On paper, she would have

to have a guardian if she was widowed or never married or hasn't got a father in the mix.

So she would have had to have a guardian for that on paper, but she very likely didn't do that often. It's one of those things where it's like, "Okay, officially fine, I've done that." Because that alone I mentioned between two women, they're conducting that themselves, and yes, they probably officially had a guardian to sign it off, but let's be honest, they probably didn't, and the more I looked into women in Pompeii got down as fantastic rabbit hole,

where I thought, "Well, who would have been around Julia, who would she have been relying on?" I found all of these fascinating women that had some involvement in families that were already in business, or they were very, very old families, but that would have all existed at the same time and even on the street that Julia Felix lived on were so many women, and they were putting out electoral notices outside their houses, and as women, they couldn't vote. They're having

an involvement and a voice in the electoral process, but they couldn't vote. So clearly, women had more involvement than we give them credit for in public and private life. And putting those notices up on that street, linking the main area of Pompeii with the amphitheater, right, on games day, they're going to see that, that's like prime advertising for that street, so yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And like to, so of those seven, we've mentioned

too already, the slave and Julia Felix, Petronus and Julia Felix, you mentioned Garam earlier,

“where you mentioned fish sauce, I think I've spoiled it now, but if Pompeii is so famous for”

this fish sauce, is there a fish sauce figure? He features in your list. Easy for you to say. Yes, they're absolutely as so our lowest and brickier scourous is the fish sauce magnate of Pompeii. Wow, okay, the magnate, the magnate, the magnate. He is the guy, because he had dominated fish sauce, the fish sauce industry in Campania. He has the majority of labels on jars, these terracotta jars that they put out with the fish sauce in it. It's a very like specific

shape with a pointy end and like you'd you'd sit the bottle up. It wasn't like an amphora. It wasn't completely, you know, the amphora is a backyard. So they're like these tiny little pretty bottles, and on that, they would have branding, and it would say, usually, flower of Garam from the workshop of scourous, for example. And so there was this formula that he developed as branding, that would recur on every bottle of his fish sauce. So you can track his empire,

basically, whether these ceramic spread to exactly, and he goes as far as gall, as Britannia. Yeah, so he's, it's going so far out. And like I mentioned earlier, plenty mentions the fish sauce of Pompeii. If he's dominating that fish sauce, it's very likely that, because they were around at the same time, that it was his fish sauce that he was referring to,

which I just think is crazy. We can track that. Yeah, that's amazing.

That lane between archaeology and literature, right there. Oh, it's the best. It's an archaeologist

“stream, honestly. It's a thing, actually, we've been mentioning, coming all the way to Britannia,”

if the main trading hub of Roman Britain, the way that goods are getting into this land, is Londonian, is London. So we are probably doing this interview very close to where bottles of that fish sauce from scourous from Pompeii went through, you know, almost 2,000 years ago. That is quite cool in itself. It's a bit mind-blowing, isn't it? It's amazing. I love it so much. And you know, he was so fond of his branding that he ended up putting mosaics of his bottles

in his atrium. So his entrance hallway with this branding on it. It's just incredible.

He had about, we think, about seven workshops in the city. But by the time, so again, post-earth quake, it looks like from recent excavations that are being done on working people, which is great. I'm so pleased about that and not on occupations. It looks like he was converting the workshops or selling them off and exporting sort of this main production process to places like Portugal, where they had huge manufacturing processes that were able to, you know, cope with this amount of

fish sauce that people wanted. It was basically like their catch-up. They put it on everything.

He loved it. So we've had a slave. We've had this business woman and now we've got

“fish sauce magnets, scourous. Four others to do. Who else? Well, who's next in the list?”

So probably a good segue is to Brickie or Fortunata. Okay. Who yes sounds very much like I'm Brickieus. And that's because she was his freed woman. And again, she did really exist. She was working for him in the fish sauce business. I just think it's just again, fascinating. Because we've again got these bottles with the branding on it, but it was say her name. Because she's I'm Brickiea and people would know his brand in Pompeii very well.

There's that association. So it's almost like, you know, it's a badge of honour. The seal of approval almost oh, this comes from the end of the year. I'm Brickiea Branchia. Exactly. And she was very savvy because she was creating or at least she was selling fish sauce that was kosher as well. So she's doing like specific needs in business as well. That's brilliant. So we've got two business women that we already mentioned that are really

tailoring their businesses to what people want at that time. You know Julia converted the bars after the earthquake also. We've got on Brickiea who's going into business after her freeing. And so it's just fascinating. So I've created a round of Brickiea her family. I wanted to depict a working family in the city of poor family. And I'd been studying this house

called the Shophouse Garden. If you walked past it, you would never notice it. It's not labeled or

anything like that. It's very, very unassuming. But you walk in. It's got one room. Then another room at the back. They would have had an apartment upstairs. And then you've got a huge garden next to it. And again, it was one of those that had been the buildings have been demolished. They created a vineyard with vegetable plots. And the most lovely part of this was that at the back of this garden in the corner, there was a living area for the family with children's toys, cooking

pots, a little niche for a shrine. They hadn't, it looks like they hadn't awning over them. They'd even chosen the spot based on the shade a tree would give in the afternoon, you know, as the sun would come round. And they'd put shards in the top of the wall to stop thieves coming in and stealing their fruit. And you know, for someone like me, I'm able to reconstruct what that garden looked like based on the root cavities that were found there during the eruption process.

There's a process where we were able to put plaster Paris into the root cavities that were left when an organic material decays exactly like the people are created. And so you can literally reconstruct where the paths were, where the vines were, where the stakes were, where the trees were,

“it's amazing. That's the other very cool part of the Pompei archaeology isn't it?”

It's like, "Well, hey, ma'am, just chemically, she's like kind of the, um, my yes." Like, the grandmother of all of this, this study of that, she, the vine roots and the, that the exactly, you know, the various things that were being grown because you can look at the cavities as you're saying. And then actually, really, alongside, get a real idea of just how

verdant and how beautiful those areas would have looked incredible. Yes, exactly. I think she

estimated that a third of the city was green. And then I collaborated with a couple of other archaeologists on a map. And it pretty much is about a third of its green, which again, if you look at it now, you think that's a very great city. But no, there would have been birds song everywhere, and there would have been vines crawling over walls. It would have smelled amazing. I mean, we had perfume gardens as well. I just think it's a very different image to what we have of it.

It was very, very much alive. It's, well, and talking about the city very much being alive, let's go on to the end keeper. Oh, I love him, Yucsenus. Yes, Yucsenus. And actually, just some ski was actually responsible for excavating his property as well as the shophouse garden. She's my personal hero. So Yucsenus is an in-keeper. And he's one of those rare people, a bit like Alice and Brickie Scourys, that we know a huge amount about based on what he left behind in this

one place. We know where he lived. We know what his name was, and we know his occupation.

Really rare in Pompeii. You can't always be certain. We know his name because on the

outside of his property, he'd put up these political messages that I'd said about calling for the election of a politician. Hey, there's one. Inside, there was an amphora for wine and it had his name and the address on it. Not fantastic. So it said deliver to Yucsenus at the Calpona,

“which is an in near the amphitheater. Okay, so that's how they do addresses back then. Okay,”

right. Which just shows us in itself that everybody was very familiar with one another. This was a small community. Everyone would have known one another. And just having that specific address, they would have known Yucsenus. It's just lovely anyway. He was part of the community. So at the back, again, after the earthquake, he created this vineyard for a bit like a pub garden for his customers.

because he'd put dolly at which these huge terracotta jars that he would ferment wine in. He even

had a couple of those and he'd left them out of the ground so that they would create stronger

“wine. This is him trying a new business venture, is it? I think so. I think he was quite a like,”

you know, Wheeler Dealer, sort of character. And he had another vineyard as well in the next room that he'd created, also in his domus area. And we've got the classic counter. We've got the shrine on the wall with the serpents. We've got a dining room at the back that people would definitely have been gambling in and trying to pull women. So I think it's like a really vibrant place. This is in. Yeah, back in 879. Well, you mentioned Isis earlier and how important Isis was.

And your next figure is one of the religious community that worship to this goddess.

Yeah, you know, this is again one of those very rare. Because of the way I wrote this book,

I had to find case studies that were very well documented because I wanted it to be as factual as possible. And as much as it might sound like fiction, I wanted it to be based in fact. If it can't have happened plausibly or didn't happen, it was it's not in the book. And so the temple of Isis is a really good example of that where the excavators, even though it was excavated really early, put a huge amount of effort into recording every bit of this temple and preserving it. So if you

go to the archaeological museum in Naples, and I recommend everybody goes, they have pretty much everything from the temple there. And it's reconstructed even in this little plastic model, which is just fantastic. So you walk in and my character, Amasusius, again, did exist. He's on a fresco, he's depicted his classic bald head that the priests would have. They were completely hairless, like how eyelashes and everything in his robes. And underneath is a little name. And it's been

interpreted as different names, but Amasusius is what I can read. And I'm sticking with that. So he would have been one of a number of priests and priestesses in this temple to Isis. And as I mentioned, Isis was the mother goddess of Egypt. She was the goddess of rebirth,

“and very important for all people in society. And that was fairly rare in the sense that”

you wouldn't always get cults that were attracting women at the same time as slaves, at the same

time as men and freed men. You know, it was one of those all round the cults. So it was very, very important in Pompeii. And it was clearly becoming more and more popular because we've got graffiti around the town that says, there's one fabulous one that says the worshipers of Isis are everywhere. And that's the whole graffiti. And it's just like, as a complaint, or just saying, it is, and I'm not sure. Kind of sounds like a threat. But we've also got them, you know,

evidence of this cult crossing over with the lives of other people. So Julia Felix is one of those. She has yes. She has a shrine in her garden to Isis. And she has Egyptian motifs in her dining room. She meant she was, yes, there's, there's pig me's in this crocodiles. There's a river nile scene. Exactly. Very exotic in there. Yeah. And the river nile, especially as a

“European, so the water feature that runs down the straight one that runs down the garden,”

that's a European. And that's another Egyptian motif. And it runs to the shrine. Can't see the shrine now because the excavators literally lifted it out. It's not anymore. But this was very personal to her. And then a couple of doors down. We have Octavius Kortio. And he is the one that had the priest depicted in this fresco. He also has a Europeus. He also has a shrine to Isis. So we've got this community. They're not greatly far from the

temple either. We've got evidence of these people that were actively worshiping Isis and involved in the cult. So much so that they were changing the decoration of their houses to suit that. He's one of the people we know the fate of as well. Of course, I've assigned it to his name, but we know of the certain fates of certain people. And he's one of them. And the fate is in whether they die in the eruption or whether they survive. Or whether they survive.

And I won't tell you which. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. What he does is it's interesting what we've covered because we've certain figures like Yucsines and the senior picture there. You know, with the gambling, but also the business opportunity, maybe scourous as well. Actually, if it shows every day Romans in a more relatable light. Because so often you think of the gladiatorial combat from the thing like that

and their attitudes and you can easily show how different they are on day. But it is one of those complex things, how the Romans, they are really strange to us and so many things. But in other ways, like every day tasks, how they live their lives, how they survive. These jobs, these figures we're talking about, they can be relatable at the same time. They're so relatable. And you know, it's one of those old things that people say, particularly

very different." And I think personally, that forgets the human element of these people. Yes,

“okay, fine. You know, even just in the way that their politics worked, for example, or the food”

that they are, okay, yeah, they were a bit different. And their morals were definitely different to us today, particularly in relation to slavery, for example. That does separate us. But they're human beings. So when you find children's toy in an area that they used to enjoy their dinner in the garden, that is not different to today at all. It's not different at all. You know, and creating a pub garden, because he knows, for a fact, that people are going to prefer drinking

in that environment to a dingy indoor room. So he's created this expanded area with a garden. And you know, and I'm Brick your scourous, knowing that branding, and he's the first evidence that we have in the ancient world of branding in that way. So he has understood the psychology

“of people, and thought, okay, this is giving it some, um, they want, they want to buy from me.”

These things are universal. They'll never change. They woke up with the same worries and joys and

hopes that we wake up with every day. They would go to sleep with the same ones. And they wanted to ultimately live a life with their friends and family that they could, it's just like going to the region in Italy today. I really, I watch people outside these families children running around at nighttime in the central squares and think, this is no different, you know, at the fundamental level there, or we're all human, and we all share the same fundamental, you know, values.

Nah, no small things to each other, because the red-cut-captional life in the tribe, with the or the male, the woman, or the female, the woman who lives in the same area, and detects our

interactive exhibition by the elite tour with audio guide and a classic and the next parvillion,

the whole world of red-cut-captional life in the red-cut-captional life, only a set of things. Before we now go into the more catastrophic part of the story of Pompeii, there is still one more figure to do, and this figure gives us an insight more into the political side, the elections. This isn't the election to the main Senate in Rome or anything like this, but this gives you more sense of politics on a local town level. Yes, this is Geys Kuspius Panzer. Again, very well documented

in Pompeii. His name is all over the city in 879, literally, because he's in lots and lots of electoral graffiti around the town, and it appears that they're all really mostly from ordinary people, because of what they're saying, they're saying, "I'm a fuller," you know, someone that would do laundry. So different people are instead of very posh people calling for his election, so he was like

“as a sort of the people's man. Or at least, I think he would have put himself across, like Panzer was part of an old family,”

a bit like Scourus, and he would have had values, Roman male values that we would find problematic today, and so I wanted to sort of depict those problematic Roman values that wouldn't have seemed problematic at the time. Prejudices about people being lower than him, or how he got into office, things like that, but it's really interesting to see the involvement that he would have had in the city at a direct level, walking around the city in the way he would interact with others. He's a really, really

interesting, but yes, problematic character, and Petronus, the slave in my book, "Lives in His House," so we get to see the different perspective that those people would have had in the same house, it almost looks like a completely different place. And those figures at the top, you know, who very much know there at the top in the Pompeii setting, would they also be the ones, you know, that they'll try and get a statue of themselves erected in the main forum of Pompeii, they'll want to try and

leave a legacy, and as you say, you know, don't really care that much for the people beneath them. They're very much focused on themselves and leaving their own legacy on this, on this town. Absolutely. That was the biggest thing that a Roman male would want to achieve was legacy in that sense where their family wouldn't die as long as their name is remembered. And so he has family members with statues in the forum. He has family members with statues

in the amphitheid because they were involved in its reconstruction. And so, Panzer is one of those people that's like very much attached to the fabric of Pompeii's life through his family by virtue of his family.

very, very recently in the summer elections. He would have then been put into office on the

first of January. Well, we obviously don't get to that. Regardless of the date of the eruption,

it was, you know, at that time at the end of 79 so he would have come in an 80 AD and he didn't quite get there, but he would have been very much involved in city life already because he was so well-known and they just elected him. But, you know, Pompeii is notorious in the Republican onwards for being really difficult for politics. Bear in mind, so when Scissorot was writing about Pompeii, he says Pompeii is difficult and he's talking about the politics and the fact that Scissorot thinks

that, and he's, you know, having a hard time. More than 100 years earlier, yep. Yeah, it's notorious for being politically difficult to survive. So someone like Panzer is going to have to be a

“pretty robust character to get through that. And so yeah, he's an interesting one, I think.”

Well, just this has been a great way to kind of highlight these specific lives within Pompeii that in 79 AD and of course, you know, they're just seven of tens of thousands. Well, well, over 10,000 people are living in Pompeii at the time. So you've, you've crased a lovely picture of what Pompeii was actually like. And then we get to the date of the eruption.

Let's start talking through it. First off, how do we know so much about the eruption? What types

of sources do we have available to kind of track the events that follow? Yeah, so we have multiple things that we can draw on. Of course, the archaeology is the main one. It was preserved in a very specific way with pyroclastic flows, which we'll talk about. The conditions of the eruption on that very specific day down to the heat of it, preserved it in a certain way. And that wouldn't necessarily happen on another day. So as archaeologists were fortunate and, you know, for lack

of a better word, it's not fortunate at all, but it's preserved it in that way. We also have plenty of the younger letters to test us, explaining this about 20 years later, explaining his first hand account events that he experienced of watching this eruption happen. And his uncle, plenty of the elder who we've also talked about actually being involved in the rescue efforts and passing away there during the eruption. So we have that side, the very human reaction to it.

And then we've got the stratigraphy, so the layers of the eruption that we can reconstruct the events and even down to the hour now. Right. Well, let's do it hour by hour. How does the eruption begin? So the eruption begins. We've got obviously earthquakes that have been happening for a very long time previous and there would have probably been earthquakes happening at this time

while the volcano is starting to erupt basically. A column of ash goes up into the sky and it

“goes miles and miles and miles high. I think it's like multiple bourgeois caliphers. It's so, so high.”

Importantly, it creates a sort of ceiling over the bay of Naples. So it goes up and is described by cleaning the younger as like a plain tree. A plain tree, okay, yes. Which anyone that's been to the region today will know these, they're umbrella pines, they're called, because they look like an umbrella. And so it goes out and it sort of eventually blocks out the sun. After a while, so this is around midday to 1 p.m. that this happens. So everyone's confused, of course,

because as we've talked about, they didn't know it was necessarily a volcano. They're also going to start thinking, is this the gods? So they annoyed with us, you know, is this something that will pass, they wouldn't necessarily know to run from this. It feels very apocalyptic. Very apocalyptic, yeah. And actually, you know, Pliny the younger does say at one point during his letter that he was struggling to be concerned about it too much, because at the end of the day, if the world's

ending, he said, then everyone else is in it. So it's like, you can't really, it was something they couldn't quite conceive in their heads. They thought, well, everyone else is in it. And they wouldn't know any different, which is petrifying, Petra. So yes, so this umbrella comes out and after a little while, pumice starts raining from the sky. It's very, very light and gray and cold, it's like warm, but it's not hot at first. And that's raining, because they're tiny little

pieces. And that's creating a blanket over the city. We'll focus on pumperate. Yeah. The wind is blowing in a south-eastily direction specifically. And again, this is the thing, if the wind had been blowing another way, some people think it would have been, it's a different day, it's another excuse for the date being in October. But B, we would have had different towns preserved in different ways. So it really is, that's another important fact. Because Pompey is today, if you've got a map

“of malvosevious, it is directly south-east, isn't it? And how can any of them is also that way?”

So they are both in the line of fire with that wind. Exactly, which is why they've become the star of the show in a horrible way. You know, they're the victims of this in the worst case

pumperate has been raining for a while, then we've got larger lumps coming down and they're

“very, very hot. There are a level that has been measured now that would burn the skin upon”

contact. So that's terrifying. And because this pumperate is building up, it's causing rufs to collapse. So over the hours that are coming, you know, by early evening, it's completely dark. No one can see the noise of it must have been absolutely petrifying. There was lightning in the clouds because of the effects of the volcanic eruption. And then after a while, at about 7 p.m., it is thought to now, the first pyroclastic flow falls down from the column. And this is where the column has become

so heavy that it's collapsed in on itself. And it's like an avalanche. And it is very much like an avalanche, because apparently it's not that loud either. They would have heard it to an extent, but it was more like a little rumble. And so this pyroclastic flow comes down and completely buries herculanium under 20 meters of volcanic material by the end of the eruption. It would

be under 20 meters, which is just incredible. And you go to herculium today and you go down to

“the boat sheds, don't you? And you see this great wall, actually to get down, you have to go”

like almost through it. And then you realize just that is all volcanic debris that was deposited there. It's just wow. It's crazy. And most people say to me, oh yeah, I was on the cliff. And I think well that's not a cliff actually. That's the volcanic material. And that's where the coastline was. Like that was the beach. So that's crazy. And so yes, so herculanium was completely destroyed quite early on. That's about six hours in. Yeah. And so volcanic eruption, it keeps going. It keeps

going as getting worse. And the pumice is still falling. People are getting stuck inside houses now because the pumice has got a couple of meters high. But it's blocking doors in. This is when we have Pliny, the younger saying they realize, you know, his uncles had a sleep. He's had a, he's had a dinner. They're so casual. Especially if you are a Roman elite male, you had to look like you were keeping your composure. That made you a very good virtuous man. And so Pliny, the younger

“is depicting his uncle as that way. He might not have been doing this. He might have been completely”

panicking and running around like a headless chicken. But he's being depicted as being very calm and in control of the situation for a reason. And he's saying that, oh dear, the atrium is starting to, you know, fill up. We realize we can't stay doing what we're doing because it is blocking indoors. And so in a villa just outside of Pompeii, very recently, and people might have seen this in the news. A couple of people were found inside a room. They'd blocked the door in

because your instinct is to hide, right, in a situation like this, if you don't know better. But they got trapped because Pummers had risen to such a height that they couldn't open the door again.

And so they were trapped in a, you know, coffin of their own making, basically.

Very delightful. Yes. Yes. And so that's all going on. And of course you mentioned her Canadian. It's worth mentioning the 300 people that were hiding in the boat sheds. There were people trying to escape by the sea, which is what Pliny, the elder was trying to help with one of his boats that he was in charge of. From Mizonym, he was a general in charge of that. And there's 300 people that were hiding in the boat sheds. And until, you know, the 1980s

when archaeologists found them, we thought that most people had got out of her Canadian pretty much that everyone had been evacuated. No, they were all down by this post. And so it's mostly women and elderly people and children inside the boat sheds. And outside of the boat sheds on the beach are mostly men and soldiers and horses actually and boats. So this giving a pattern of what's happening over time. Okay. So people are still trying to escape hours and hours later.

And then the pyroclastic flows start hitting Pompeii in the early hours of the next day. So we've

gone hours along. So the first pyroclastic flow that hit Herculanium didn't reach Pompeii. So that's

why Herculanium story ends earlier. But Pompeii is still, it's still still going at this time. Pompeii is still going. And people are still escaping. But there's a low in the Pommes flow in the early hours. It's around some rise some time. There seems to be a low in the Pommes fall. And so it must have been like almost, I know there's the volcanic eruption, but I've got this feeling of like this low in the sound as well. You know, because obviously people are screaming and trying to get out.

But it's been a long time now. And the Pommes falling the rain sound of that would have stopped. And so people start going back into the city. Oh, no. They think it's ended. Okay. Yeah. And you would, you know, why would they know any better? So anyone that's gone out to the villas outside or further than that, starting to come back because they're looking for their family and friends, because they want to go and get possessions. You know, they don't know that

something else is about to happen and it's going to get a lot worse. And so in the early hours

the northern wall and it doesn't get over the wall. Oh, really. So it actually does stop that super

hot avalanche in its tracks that stone wall. Yes. This stone wall that has been there for hundreds of years, which was the original boundary of Pompey has protected them once again in a funny sort of way. So this would have really freaked everybody out in there because at this point breathing would be almost impossible. They're still trying to pull people out of debris and get people out from places. There's dogs crying underneath beds because they're stuck there and they're chained up.

The is just chaos and they're trying to cover their mouths. And then a pyroclastic flow very soon after that starts coming down again. But this time it breaches the wall. It comes over the wall. It's such a bigger one. It's got a more force behind it and it takes out the city. And everyone that is there is killed instantly with this flow that hit them. The heat was

incredible hundreds of centigrade and they would have, yeah, been killed instantly, which is a small

comfort. But the petrifying circumstances for those very many hours before is not to comfort. No, it's a very chilling retelling. But it's like it's a key part of the story and the dare I say bodies that we have today are the bodies of people who died in that pyroclastic flow instantly or are they of the people who did slowly asphyxiate buried in pumice? Who's remains do we have surviving? Yes, there's a good like not a majority but a good amount of the people

that have been found. So we found about 1600 to 1700 victims so far. So when you base that on

“20,000 people that's a death toll I think of between sort of 8 and 11 per centish. So it's not as big”

as you think for an eruption of this size. And so the people that were found in the city are

there's a lot of them that have been found in the pumice level, which means that they have asphyxiate it. So they've suffocated or they have been hit by debris. So actually not all of them were killed by this pyroclastic flow. There is a good amount of them that were killed in these other layers but then the pyroclastic flows hit and it's more than half of the people but they were in really different positions around the city. We've got a lot of people coming out of the gates

flowing out of the gates and found on the streets outside. We've even got a person a man in a tree. Yeah, so he was hiding and he thought I can get above it. So clearly they're seeing it coming and it goes so fast. So he's trying to get above it. We've got people on top of the pumice layers that other people are in dead. We've got horses lying on their sides that have suffocated. But then we've also got the people that were hit by the pyroclastic flow and because of the

nature of the heat and the suddenness of it, they do this thing called the box suppose where all of their muscles contract and they end up putting their hands above the usually above their face

“as if they're about to box and that's why they're found in these contorted positions. Even dogs and”

pigs have been found in these funny contorted positions and so they are able to preserve those with the plaster of Paris method where they're bodies leave a cavity when they decay, skeleton still in there, mind you and then you fill it with plaster of Paris, you can take them material around it which cemented by the way, around them and then you have this form and you can see the clothes that they're wearing the faces, the jewelry, it's crazy. And we've got about 100

plaster casts of those people. They don't do that anymore and some of them were destroyed in World War II bombing, which is unfortunate. But overall they're starting to conduct DNA analysis on these people. For example, we had a couple who were sort of thought as mother and father with two children under some stairs. They've since been found to be completely unrelated. The children were unrelated, the people were unrelated and they would both men. This could be

for example a case of slaves in a household hiding under the stairs. They wouldn't have probably gone. They might have been ordered to stay there, for example. And so these things are very,

“very hard to look at. The plaster cast, but it's very important to remember that they are”

not things but people and that their skeletons are inside there, but they're also giving us a huge amount of evidence because they were all killed evenly. Regardless of their status, it was a

but all at the same time. So for an archaeologist, it's a very rich source. A rich source, but of course,

“like a horrible story. But at the same time, that tragic end is why bringing to the lights,”

those figures we talked about earlier, the people who lived in Pompeii before, is even more fascinating to get more of a sense of how they lived. I mean, you mentioned earlier when you came out like that apocalyptic sense that surely many of them were feeling when they saw, you know, the sky, well, go dark and that it covered the sun, this pumice cloud. I remember talking to

Gabriel Soutrigal last year. And he had this amazing story that apparently they found

evidence of an early Christian community in Pompeii. Yes. And the mention of Fire and Brimstone of the original Fire Brimstone of Sodom and Gomorrah written on a wall in Pompeii. So imagine if that person was still alive, that early Christian, who'd written Sodom and Gomorrah on the wall. And they were all of a sudden, he's seen a real life fire and Brimstone raining down on

“him and Pompeii. That's an amazing thing to think about. I know. It's crazy. I think if these layers”

of these experiences, these human experiences and how they would have been trying to conceive of this immense disaster that was happening in front of them to their home. And details like that are incredible. Not only are we getting an insight into the changing empire that's happening in quite a significant way, but also, yeah, how they would try to conceive of these disasters. And I mentioned the giants being under the volcano, for example.

Pliny talks about how some people said that they thought they could see giants in the ash coming out. So they're trying to understand why this is happening. You know, the area was also known for having holes that go down to hell and things, you know, the Roman equivalent of hell. So everyone would have had their different ideas of what's happening. And again, yeah, that's very human isn't it? We try and find reason in these things. I kind of international

part of it as well, that yes, there are people worshiping the Roman gods. That was an Egyptian gods who mentioned Jews, early Christians and all that and how they're contemplating the stories. It's amazing. Just I could ask so many more questions around this. I guess we should mention that. But the aftermath, there are survivors. This isn't the end of Pompeii story.

Pompeii does have enough to life following the eruption. It does. And again, we never talk about it.

It's sort of forgotten. There was definitely a community living there. And again, this is being found in the archaeology now. They're sort of baking there and creating sort of ad hoc properties on top of this layer. And you know, it was under about six meters of volcanic material which cemented particularly as there was after rainfall. It cemented even more. So they were trying to dig down. If you imagine a graveyard with little things poking out, that's kind of how it was. So you'd

been able to see where the amphitheater was and they'd have been like, right, okay. So the amphitheater is there. There's a bit of a column poking out there from the forum. My house should be around here. Somewhere so they're tunneling down, trying to get their things. And people would have gone back not knowing that these pyroclastic flows are here necessarily. If they'd gone to Rome, for example, and come back, I can't imagine the shock of finding that. Also, I don't know how people

found each other afterwards. We don't have the luxury of communicating in their way and becoming refugees in their own country. They had literally lost their town. Was there a scheme or anything that

“we know of that they tried to kind of get people back together and help them in after-math this crisis?”

Yes. So the amphitheater was in power at this time and he set up a relief fund and they took the money of anyone that hadn't managed to survive and put that into the relief fund as well. But he did send people to, he went to Campania to survey the evidence of this disaster himself, as they say,

and they basically decided there wasn't anything they could do. And so they almost, they'd been

pretty much wrote Pompeii in her Q&A and took it off the map, essentially. And after a while, it did just, yeah, forgotten. It just became a footnote in history. Until, of course, last couple of centuries where Pompeii, how can they even alike have become one of the best? Well, ancient archaeological sites in the world, continuing to inspire so many people, including yourself. You've done so much there and you've now written this book shining a light on these

everyday people who got caught up in the eruption. As you also mentioned earlier, we won't spoil it as to whether they survived or whether they didn't, but it's not that they all died, is it? No, I've chosen their fates based on either the things I know about them from the archaeological record or to give a cross section of the fates of people in Pompeii and they're representing

I was writing the conclusion, it's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. And that sounds

very dramatic. But putting into words the disaster that they were experiencing, the fallout from that the chaos, the panic. It was very, very hard to come to terms with. I was in bits. I was crying. I was crying every couple of days because I sort of put myself in the position of people that we've got records of today in tragedy and watching videos of events and trying to understand the very

“human element of that. And you have to put a lot of yourself into that. And so it was hard to write”

about their fates. But really important to know that yes, people did survive this, as we mentioned.

It's only about 8 to 11 percent, which considering the scale of this disaster, touch wood,

that's what it remains at. But there's still a third of the city to be excavated. So we are, you know, we will see. So much more to find out. So any more books like this in the future to do as well, Jess, this has been absolutely fantastic. Last but certainly not least, your book is called.

The last voices of Pompeii, and it is out now. Fantastic. Jess, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thank you so much, pleasure. Well there you go. There was Dr. Jessica then, talking through those last chaotic days of Pompeii

“and the lives of these key figures that were living in that Roman town almost 2,000 years ago”

when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it just as much as I did recording it with Jess. Now if you've been enjoying the entrance recently, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcast. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd also be kind enough to leave

“us a rating as well, where we would all really appreciate that. Last but not least, don't forget,”

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